Gladiolus is a herbaceous bulbous plant grown for its beautiful flowers of different colour, shades and shapes throughout the world. Gladiolus belongs to the Family Iridaceae, Order Liliales and Class Monocotyledon.
Gladiolus is one of the important cut flowers throughout the world. The commercial cultivation is wide spread in temperate, tropical and subtropical climates. The demand of new varieties with better colour, quality flowers, and planting materials is always existing in the floriculture trade.
The modern garden cultivators gladiolus come from diverse genetic parentages. It has cumulative heterozygosity for many characters inherent with complex genetic constitution. In gladiolus, diverse parents are crossed together and the cultivars and the species that differ widely in chromosome numbers are also cross-fertile. In the present invention, the desirable strains obtained in F1 generation were perpetuated vegetatively without being segregated in the following generations, so that the cultivars which are available today may be F2, F3 to F8 or so of a particular cross further blended with some extra parents at nearly every generation. Thus they are not allowed to segregate freely in further generations because it is desirable to grow the plants asexually. Because of this reason, now the available modern cultivars have become so complex that the offspring obtained by crossing them, even two seedlings, do not appear similar [(Misra, 1975) Gladiolus Br. Assn. Newsletter, No. 12, pp. 2-5].
The Applicants collected germplasm of different cultivars and hybrid varieties of gladiolus from National Botanical Research Institute Lucknow, India as per the list of gladiolus cultivars grown in India and described in the bulletin of ‘gladiolus’ Economic Botany Information Service by Sharma et al. published by the Director National Botanical Research Institute Lucknow, 1988. Germplasm of Gladiolus was also collected from Netherlands in 1991 and various nurseries of Kalimpong, Darjeeling, West Bengal, India. The record of the collected germplasm of gladiolus was maintained in the accession register of the Floriculture Division of the Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology (IHBT), Palampur, India.
The applicants initiated a breeding program to develop better types of gladiolus hybrids suitable to wide range of climatic conditions, and having wide range of characteristics such as better colour, increased number of florets and spike length as per the international standards, better yield of corms and cormels, tolerant to the common diseases etc. The collected germplasm of gladiolus was planted in the experimental field of IHBT for their propagation and multiplication. In this breeding programme conventional breeding method (hybridization) was used. More than 100 cross combinations were made by using distinct varieties such as ‘Oscar’ (unpatented), ‘Jester’ (unpatented), ‘Snow Princess’ (unpatented), ‘Eurovision’ (unpatented), ‘Ballerina’ (unpatented), ‘King Liar’ (unpatented), ‘Cherry Blossom’ (unpatented), ‘Her Majesty’ (unpatented), ‘Green woodpecker’ (unpatented), ‘Friendship’ (unpatented), ‘Vink's Glory’ (unpatented), ‘Aldebaran’ (unpatented), ‘Red Beauty’ (unpatented), ‘Top Brass’ (unpatented), ‘Copper King’ (unpatented), ‘Bonfire’ (unpatented), ‘White Goddess’ (unpatented), ‘Sunny Boy’ (unpatented), ‘Tropic Sea’ (unpatented), and ‘Friendship Pink’ (unpatented), etc.
Color description of some of the parentage as described in NAGC Bulletin.                ‘Oscar’—Turkey red, throat blotched sulphur yellow.        ‘Green Woodpecker’—Pea Green, throat blotched pea green spotted ruby red.        ‘Eurovision’—Signal red, throat streaked pea green.        ‘Friendship Pink’—Dawn Pink, throat blotched pea green having splashes ruby red.        ‘Aldebaran’—Straw Yellow and throat bloched signal red.        ‘Friendship’—Clear pink with yellow throat.        ‘Jester’—Ruffled, deep Yellow petals and bright red blotches.        ‘Her Majesty’—Ruffled, Blue violet with darker edges and white throat.        ‘Snow Princess’—White.        ‘Eurovision’—Light Vermillion with white veins.        ‘Purple King’—Purple, rich in colour with white picottee edges, white marks deeper in the throat.        
These parentage plants are grown in India for more than 25 years. Details regarding these plants have been published and these plants are available to the public.
As the aim is the production of seed of known parentage, emasculation in first three flowers in a selected spike is done before the opening of the flowers and stigma becomes receptive. Anthers are removed carefully from each flower. Emasculated flowers were covered with butter paper bags used for breeding purposes. Pollination was done in the emasculated flowers next day morning with in 24-30 hours with the pollens of the desired parents in the month of April-May 1992. The seeds were collected from mature pods in the month of July-August 1992 and were sown in beds under open field conditions and covered with dry grasses for moisture preservation in December 1992. The resultant seedlings were space planted in the field at Palampur in March-April 1993.
Many seedlings came out from a single cross combination. These plants were critically evaluated and tagged as per the desired colour combinations, growth and flowering parameters. The corn and cormels of the selected hybrid plants were replanted continuously four years in the filed for further evaluation and multiplications. Based on the superior performance for attractive colour combination, compactness of flower spike, number of flowers per spike, length of flower spike, Number of corm and cormels per plant evaluation and selection of superior quality hybrids were made.
Thus, the breeding program involved hybridisation of commonly available gladiolus plants. In other words, the hybrids were developed by crossing parental genotypes involving sexual hybridization in the breeding programme.
The program yielded a number of hybrid plants out of which one genotype namely IHBT-GH-253 was selected and christened as ‘The Saint’. The plant is a hybrid between ‘Purple King’ and ‘Friendship’. This plant was found to have new colour, flower size, number of florets per spikes, length of flower spikes, better yield of corm and cormels and less prone to common diseases. Growing the plant on a commercial scale offers the horticulturists an improved and new variety, which can be commercially cultivated.